Amélie (2001)

B-
SDG

Like the similarly acclaimed Moulin Rouge!, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
Amélie is a whimsical, hyperactive, self-aware,
lavishly overdesigned fantasy-romance, set in a retro, fairy-tale
Paris, about a tender young idealist who falls in love with a
sex-industry employee — but there the similarities end.

Seriously, the two films do have less in common than the above
summary might suggest, and if you liked or disliked one of the
two films, that may not be much help predicting whether you’ll
like or dislike the other. Some people will like or dislike both
films for the same reasons; others will like one and dislike the
other, for reasons as individual as each of these unique,
creative, problematic films.

I was intrigued by Moulin Rouge!’s energy and daring,
but put off by its emotional hollowness and decadent milieu. For
me, Amélie benefits from the comparison. Amélie
herself (Audrey Tautou in a star-making turn) is more winsome
than than either Christian or Satine from Moulin Rouge!;
her daffy behind-the-scenes philanthropy puts to shame
Christian’s airy jaw about Freedom, Beauty, Truth, and Love, and
her flighty flirtation with Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) has more
real human emotion than the oh-so sincere operatic duets of
Moulin Rouge!’s doomed lovers.

Amélie charms with its breezy, stylized
storytelling, its quirky flights of fancy, its wish-fulfillment
meting-out of blessings to the sympathetic and punishments to the
nasty, and, above all, the wide eyes and breathless expression of
Audrey Tautou, whose first name is not the only reason she’s
sometimes mentioned in the same breath as Audrey Hepburn.

Its liabilities include a slightly dragged-out resolution and
a rather amoral view of sexuality, evinced both by its approach
to the male love-interest’s trashy line of work and by the way
characters tend to have sex as their first real expression of
romantic interest in each other, without even so much as an
intervening conversation or date in which to get to know one
another.

Like Jane Austen’s Emma (and Valley-Girl knockoff
Clueless), Amélie is about a young woman, in
this case a Parisienne waitress, who meddles furtively with other
people’s hearts and lives while remaining oblivious to the needs
of her own heart. Amélie’s motives are always benevolent;
even when she plays a series of entertainingly nasty pranks on a
neighbor who owns a grocery shop, she’s ultimately moved by
compassion for a much-abused clerk who suffers under the
ill-tempered grocer’s cruelty.

Eventually, like Emma, Amélie must come to terms with the
necessity of living her own life — though (as someone recently
observed to me) she’s never forced, as Emma was, to confront the
fact that meddling in other people’s lives can lead to disaster
as well as triumph. In Amélie, it seems, the world
tends always to be better off, or at least no worse, for the
heroine’s meddling. Even if the happy fruits of her actions
aren’t always long-lived, that seems to be attributed to the
individuals involved, who couldn’t make the most of the
opportunities Amélie afforded them.

Amélie is a celebration of life, of the wonder of
the world, of joie de vivre. Perhaps to position his film
as a postmodern fairy tale, Jeunet takes the tragic death of Lady
Diana, the premier fairy-tale figure of our era, as a kind of
touchstone. Amélie and other characters watch and discuss TV
coverage of the fatal car crash and aftermath, and Amélie’s
shock over Lady Di’s death is actually directly related to her
decision to become a kind of guardian angel to those around
her.

In this movie, life is to be lived, and the great
tragedy is to be cut off, shut in, limited, confined. An
antisocial widower staying at home in the company of a garden
gnome and a monument to his deceased wife… an elderly,
physically brittle painter whose sole pursuits are spying on his
neighbors and obsessively replicating the same Renoir again and
again… a neurotic misanthrope who lives in the confines of
his twisted imagination and confides his inner life to a
hand-held tape recorder… these are people in need of
Amélie’s special help — people who need to have their
horizons broadened, to be awakened to the wonder of life.

On the other hand, that mysterious young man who always seems
to be fishing for something under those passport-photo booths in
public places… whatever can he be about? Here is an
individual with some sort of passion, someone interested in
something outside himself and his own narrow world. He’s
practically the only person Amélie meets who doesn’t seem to
need her help — and the only one who awakens in her any awareness
of anything lacking in her own life.

Even so, Amélie is put off, though only briefly, by the
young man’s employment in a sex shop offering peep shows and
various forms of pornography. The extreme crudity with which she
is greeted the first time she tries to make phone contact with
Nino vividly illustrates the corrosiveness of the environment in
which he works; yet she very quickly concludes (and the movie
seems to expect the audience to agree) that it doesn’t really
matter, that the important thing here is for her to pursue her
special connection with this young man.

I was unconvinced. Few lines in Moulin Rouge! made as much sense as
the advice, "Never fall in love with a woman who sells herself."
Similarly, a man whose business jargon includes the kind of
gutter talk Amélie hears on the phone is unlikely to have
much respect for women, and presumptively lacks the moral
character one would look for in a worthy beau.

Yet, though Amélie has no countervailing positive
indications regarding Nino’s moral character, and in fact knows
virtually nothing about him beyond his unusual hobby, the movie
romanticizes their eventual sexual union in a jarringly abrupt
morning-after bedroom scene, the culmination of a prolonged but
remote flirtation that was all fleeting glances and virtually
anonymous exchanges.

Why did the filmmakers go this route? Granted, Amélie is
so nearly silent throughout much of the film — she almost evokes
a silent-film heroine — that a talky date scene or heart-to-heart
conversation would be an unthinkable misstep. Yet instead of a
sudden morning-after scene, why not rather give the audience (for
example) a giddy, wordless montage of Amélie and Nino
variously at the amusement park (riding the carousel and eating
cotton candy), at the movies (Amélie’s eyes for once on the
screen rather than on the people behind her), eating at
restaurants, walking in the park, peering together through that
telescope thing, even playing some of Amélie’s benevolent
practical jokes? Something, anything to suggest that these two
lovely young people, whatever instantaneous connection may have
initially drawn them to one another, proceeded to enter into an
actual human relationship in which they got to know one another,
as opposed to heading straight for the bedroom.

The film’s fable-like fantasy flavor goes some way toward
Améli-orating the morally problematic
implications, but doesn’t eliminate them. In the soufflé
that is Amélie, these problematic bits are like
unfortunate shards of eggshell, to be avoided or spat out. Yet
the dish as a whole isn’t so ruined as to be worthless, and tasty
bits remain that discerning adult viewers may find worthwhile
despite the flaws.

Some of these worthwhile bits are pure artifice, including
Jeunet’s paintbox Paris, digitally free of graffiti and colorful
as the landscape of Oz. Others are pure reality, notably some
arrestingly odd sequences we see as a part of Amélie’s
campaign to draw a neighbor out of his self-imposed rut — a
campaign that has a similar effect on the viewer. Watching these
strange and wonderful real-life images, one really is struck by
the strangeness and wonder of the world. Amélie is
full of this sense of strangeness and wonder.